See You On The Other Side Sunspot

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"A certain number of people, good honest working folk, had seen something—something unusual. Something scary. Something hairy that relished pavement patty dinners!" 







That was the caption underneath the cartoon of an upright wolf eating roadkill that ran in the December 29th, 1991 article ofThe Week, the local paper of the small Wisconsin city of Elkhorn. It was an article that they thought would be fun but forgotten soon after. Stories were spreading among the kids of the town that people seeing a huge dog or wolf on two legs along a rural road late at night. The original reporter, Linda Godfrey, had to fight to get the article published.







We’ve talked with Linda on the podcast many times, but on this special anniversary, Mike and his sister Allison bring Linda back to talk about how things have changed in the three decades since Linda broke the story.







Linda’s original cartoon as it ran in The Week















It all started with a folder labeled “Werewolf”Once Linda Godfrey went to the Walworth County Animal Control officer, he already had a stack of reported sightings and unusual occurrences and the manila folder was labeled “Werewolf”.







The sightings go back to 1936Once Linda ran the story, people started contacting her about their own sightings. One man detailed his own father’s encounter  not far from Bray Road with a strange creature decades before. A story he had only shared with family before. The monster that his father had seen had all the hallmarks of the Beast that people were seeing along Bray Road in the late 1980s and early 1990s.







It’s Not Just Upright Wolves or CaninesLinda has also discovered hundreds of sightings of big cats in Wisconsin, sightings that the Department of Natural Resources says are impossible. Those sightings have political implications so sometimes cryptozoology can bleed over into the world of state politics, land zoning, and animal control.







A never-before reported sightingWhile driving home from Lake Geneva (where we have one of our most popular ghost tours!) a couple saw a puzzling creature in a cornfield in the middle of the day. Only after hearing about the Beast of Bray Road for the first time on TV a year later, did they realize that they had seen the same thing!







Listen to a special podcast episode featuring an interview with the original investigator and hear a firsthand never-before revealed encounter with the Beast of Bray Road…







Important Links:







Ep. 51 – American Monsters: An Interview With Linda Godfrey

















Ep. 197- I Know What I Saw: Monsters, Myths, And More With Linda S. Godfrey

















Rea href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08DLRK8Y9/ref=as_sl_pc_tf_til?tag=sunspot-20&linkCode=w00&linkId=d8ebc74025...

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Hello, dear listener! It’s been a bit since we published a “traditional episode” of this audio podcast, and we want you to know that we’re still here and we’re still at it!This episode is a quick “hello” and a little retrospective of what has gone on in our world since the last episode was published.

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Horror stories, clickbait, panic porn, your amygdala is constantly getting stimulated nowadays because the media understands that if they activate your fight or flight response, you’ll pay attention. The old saying goes “If it bleeds, it leads” and that applies now more than ever. We’re still in the middle of a pandemic that has kept most of the world inside and glued to TV and social media for two months. We’re constantly surrounded by news stories of how many people are predicted to die, how many deaths are already happening, and how quickly the disease is spreading, and how dangerous it is.







Millions around the world have been impacted by the disease, losing loved ones or getting sick themselves, and millions have also been affected by the reaction to it. The economic shutdown has made millions of people dependent on unemployment insurance for the first time to pay their bills and a system unprepared for such a gigantic influx of new applicants has suffocated under the weight. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses whose doors were shuttered by the shutdown orders across America that had to apply for emergency loans to the Small Business Administration didn’t even get their applications looked at before the money ran out.















The school and daycare centers are closed and parents are stuck between the rock and a hard place of trying to keep money coming in and pay bills while providing their own child care, in essence, trying to juggle working full time from home (or if you work in a hospital or food industry, still having to go in) with parenting full time.







So not only are we worried about getting sick or people we love getting sick, we’re worried that we won’t have enough money to pay the bills and feed the children that we’re now assuming the teaching . Add to that, we’re in the middle of an election year, so the political teams have no co-opted the elements for the crisis and the lines in the sand have been drawn, depending on where your political beliefs fall.







People are desperate. People are scared. A lot of us are not okay. So, what are some ways that we can get back to “okay” when it feels like the world is crashing down on us. Our “fight ot flight” center, the amygdala is constantly being activated lately. So what are some ways that people have stayed cool in a crisis? From just breathing to praying and meditating? That’s what we cover in this episode.















Some of the different methods we discuss in this episode include:







* The scientific process behind how the brain handles anxiety* Learning breathing techniques from the Dutch Iceman, Wim Hoff, who can control his body temperature so much that he can melt ice around him* How meditation can calm your mind when you feel a panic coming on* The history behind the incorrectly called “Chinese proverb”, “May you live in interesting times.”* a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/201508/how-mantras-c...

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When Hollywood comes looking for a nasty monster from First Nations folklore, there’s one supernatural creature that seems to dominate the landscape. The legend of the Wendigo has inspired cinematic villains from Pet Sematary to Supernatural, Ravenous to Bone Tomahawk. From the legends of the Algonquin-speaking Great Lakes tribes in the Upper Midwest and Canada, the Wendigo is the evil spirit that transforms starving humans into a voracious cannibalistic monster after they finally succumb to their basest instincts and taste human flesh.







The cover of Chad Lewis’ new book with Kevin Lee Nelson – Wendigo Lore: Monsters, Myths, and Madness







These tribes lived in an area with harsh cold winters where food becomes scarce. Right around February when you haven’t had anything decent to eat for months and your body is starving for any kind of protein outside of your shoe leather, well, your neighbor might start looking pretty good. The human instinct to survive at all costs is hard to resist. The Wendigo is our warning to resist that urge, that this evil irreparably taints the soul once you feast upon another human.







Cannibalism is the ultimate human taboo. The whole reason that humans thrived on this planet is because we work together. We don’t have the natural advantages that other creatures do like fur on a bear to survive the winter cold or teeth like a wolf to dig into our prey. Our socialization is what enabled us to conquer the planet in all of its areas and climates. Winter is the cruelest climate of all because not only is terribly cold, there’s no food. Eating your fellow man is the ultimate betrayal of what makes us human, our tribal capacity to take on the world together.







Who wants some fava beans?







Chad Lewis and Kevin Lee Nelson have been working on this compendium of Wendigo lore and mythology for almost two decades. And in this episode, Chad tells us of the journey he took in writing the book. Some of the things we also talk about in this conversation:







* Why you’re never even supposed to say the name of the Wendigo * The most famous case of the Wendigo in the modern era, Swift Runner, who ate his family in 1878 Alberta* The far edges of the world that Chad Lewis and his co- author went to walk on the same ground as the people they talk about in the book* The radio station in Eau Claire, Wisconsin we used to perform at all the time and Chad had a show had an owner that thought he was a skin walker!







The Wendigo are more than just the winter spirits of desperate hunger, it is a monster that feeds on greed. The human capacity for gluttony and the desire that you will never have enough. The Wendigo, like George Romero’s zombies, is never satisfied, its craving is never satiated. It’s a eerily thin, gaunt beast who grows larger with every human it devours, but it’s still not enough. Once you break the taboo and taste the flesh, you descend into madness and you will never satisfy “The Hunger of The Damned”.











I can hear its callin the scream of the coldI can feel it crawlan infection in my soula little voice deep insideyou’d rather eat than diefind a way to justifyas the hunger takes hold.







Famine like a disease.What do you do when you’re hungryMore than a beastand the monster is me

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Millions of people have UFO stories. There is a one-hundred percent chance that you know at least one person that has a story! So, we went to our listeners and in our own archives for this episode’s tales of UFO experiences.







Once again, join me, Wendy Lynn, Scott Markus from WhatsYourGhostStory.com, and my sister Allison Jornlin from MilwaukeeGhosts.com to talk about our own stories as well as great ones from our listeners. You can watch the unedited livestream of our conversation here if you’d like to see our pretty faces while we talk.



















My sister, Allison, has her own UFO story and it happened to be on the day that my daughter was born, September of 2016. Here’s the exact text of the email she sent me and it came out about 15 minutes after the birth, she didn’t know about it yet and I didn’t have much time to think about it at the time!









I saw some UFOs today at about 7:25 a.m. and I couldn’t wait to tell you. Maybe it’s a sign. Is it baby time? Below is what I wrote for the kids today during our Quick Write: Something amazing happened to me this morning. No, my brother’s baby didn’t come yet, unfortunately. It was something else.I was driving to school on Hwy 43 Southbound when I saw something strange in the sky. Actually it was two-somethings. I wondered were they planes, but I couldn’t stop and look because I was on the expressway. That means emergency stopping only!The objects were pretty high up. That’s why I thought they were planes. But I actually saw two planes go by this morning also. These other objects didn’t seem to be moving and they didn’t have the blinking lights that planes have to have by law. They were like two groups of three bright, white lights hovering there. One was much lower than the other and off to the right. What were they? I wish I could have stopped and taken some video. By the time I got off the expressway, the lights were in back of me and seemed to be getting smaller.I think maybe they were flares, but I’m not sure. They seemed to fade out instead of coming down like they were on parachutes. They also didn’t really seem to move at all, just hanging motionless in the sky for at least 5 minutes. What do you think they were?









I’ve got my own UFO story too, not exciting like an abduction or anything, but interesting enough to me that I wrote it down the same day.







I was on a vacation in January of 2008 visiting a place called Cabo Rojo which is an incredible white sand beach on the southwestern shore of the island, opening up to the Carribbean sea with a very famous lighthouse.







There was an object far away in the sky that almost looked like a blimp, but it was tremendously high in the sky, so high and so far away that we couldn’t be quite sure of what it was. It definitely didn’t look like a cloud, even though it was completely white and high enough to be a cloud. But the rest of the clouds had some kind of softness and transparency to them and this cloud didn’t. It was definitely unusual and I thought it might be a UFO, what I really thought it might have been was some kind of alien or government ship that was up there and it was meant to be disguised as a cloud, but it was just different enough so if you looked you couldn’t tell. I dunno, I wanted to take a picture of it but I was so e...

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Everyone’s got a ghost story, from your grandma to your high school social studies teacher. In fact, some of the people that you least expect (and some skeptics as well), seem to have stories that they just can’t quite explain. One time, I remember talking to someone about ghost stories and he said, “Nothing’s really ever happened to me… well… except that time that heard my grandmother’s voice tell me to stop immediately when I was driving, and I narrowly avoided getting into a car crash that surely would have killed me.” Nope, nothing at all then.







Kevin Hart Say What GIF from Kevinhart GIFs







So, this week, we decided to talk about our personal ghost stories as well as reach out to See You On The Other Side listeners to get their tales of the unexplained, so we could share them for this special episode. Wendy and I are joined by my sister, Allison from MilwaukeeGhosts.com as well as Scott Markus from WhatsYourGhostStory.com and we originally recorded it as a livestream on Facebook.











Here’s the video of our livestream







But there was a ghost in the machine that day, so we didn’t end up listening to several of the listener stories, because of technical issues. However, all of those stories have been saved for the audio podcast for your listening pleasure, including:







* The ghost story Allison and my mother told us when we were kids when our parents lived across the street from a cemetery* Our family’s strange story of our great uncle seeing an “Angel In The Mirror” right before he died* A comforting ghost seen by our Patreon, Dr. Ned* Katie’s story, who as a young girl, was out on the road doing merchandise with a country singer calls us to let us know about a hotel she stayed at where the ghost got a little too friendly* Former Milwaukee ghost tour guide, Mike J., tells us of a childhood haunting in the “little pink house” that his family lived in* Allison and her husband’s adventures at the Haunted Larium Manor Inn in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan* Ghost hunter Scott Markus’ adventures investigating in Illinois* Quick stories recounted by Amy, Jimmy, and Tina as well…







We also read our Patreon C.E. Martin’s story, “The Closet of Terror” from his biographical paranormal novel, Stranger Than Fiction.















We’re doing more experimenting with recording the podcasts live during the lockdown of Coronavirus 2020, so thanks to everyone who’s been watching the livestreams.







For the song this week, we were inspired by Allison and my family story about our mother’s uncle who saw an angel in the mirror in the middle of the night, told his wife about it, went back to sleep, and never woke up. After hearing the tale since we were children,